I’ve realized that as of the first batch of my blogging on furiousnads.com to have been restored here from that site’s mid-2010s edition, all four of my posts on a longstanding pet peeve of mine are all online together for the very first time.

Chris Quinn, editor of the The Plain Dealer, published a “letter from the editor” over the weekend about “a college student [who] withdrew from consideration for a reporting role in our newsroom this week because of how we use artificial intelligence”. Aside from the ethics of putting this anonymous student on blast in the newspaper, a single sentence shows the true journalistic bankruptcy at work.

The guy who owns my regular coffeeshop today told me that he looks forward to making my drink because it means his working day is almost over. “My autistic routines doing good in the world,” I said. Then I got to thinking about coffee habits.

Last weekend, I took you on a brief tour of the last fifteen blog posts by other people that I’d read, inspired as I always am by Kevin Lawver’s idea, that I repeat endlessly, of blogs as the web’s empathy engine. Since I’ve been in a bout of morning insomnia today, I thought I’d repeat the exercise.

Last month, when discussing some of my go-to comfort movies that might strike other people as peculiar, counter-intuitive picks, I said a couple of things about the 2019 sci-fi film, Starfish. I called it “a movie that for me runs on vibes” with “an ending that is a strangely cathartic downer”.